At length I said to myself: “I want to get into a big unsophisticated house, the kind that is removed from this railroad. I want to find an unprejudiced host who will listen with an open mind, and let me talk him to death.”
To keep this resolve I had to hang on till near eight o’clock. The cloudy night made the way dim. At length I came to a road that had been so often graded and dragged it shed water like a turtle’s shell. It crossed the railway at right angles and ploughed north. I followed it a mile, shaking the heaviest mud from my shoes. Led by the light of a lantern, I approached a dim grey farm-house and what would have been in the daytime a red barn.
II
By the Light of the Lantern
The lantern was carried, as I finally discovered, by an old man getting a basket of chips near the barn gate. He had his eye on me as I leaned over the fence. He swung the lantern closer.
“My name is Nicholas,” I said. “I am a professional tramp.”
“W-e-l-l,” he said slowly, in question, and then in exclamation.
He flashed the lantern in my face. “Come in,” he said. “Sit down.”
We were together on the chip-pile. He did not ask me to split kindling, or saw wood. Few people ever do.
In appearance he was the old John G. Whittier type of educated laboring-man, only more eagle-like. He spoke to me in a kingly prophetic manner, developed, I have no doubt, by a lifetime of unquestioned predominance at prayer-meeting and at the communion table. It was the sonorous agricultural holy tone that is the particular aversion of a certain pagan type of city radical who does not understand that the meeting-house is the very rock of the agricultural social system. As far as I am concerned, if this manner be worn by a kindly old man, it inspires me with respect and delight. In a slow and gracious way he separated his syllables.
“Young man, you are per-fect-ly wel-come to shel-ter if we are on-ly sure you will not do us an in-ju-ry. My age and ex-per-ience ought to count for a lit-tle, and I assure you that most free travel-ers abuse hos-pi-tal-ity. But wait till my daugh-ter-in-law comes.”